While watching the first trailer for Marvel’s Moon Knight series, a few things quickly become clear about Oscar Isaac’s take on the titular hero. The first: Like its comic book counterpart, this Moon Knight will struggle with having multiple personalities. The second: One of those personalities must be believably British, despite having one of the most ridiculous British accents caught on camera recently.
In the Marvel comics, Moon Knight – created by Doug Moench and Don Perlin – is both a code name and one of the alternate personalities that co-exist in Marc Spector, a former Marine turned mercenary and appears to be after his death. resurrected and apparently resurrected by an Egyptian. moon deity known as Khonshu. While the specifics of Marc’s mental health and how it played a role in his life as a costumed hero have changed over the years, many Moon Knight stories, including the new show, revolved around the complications that arise when Marc’s other alters surface and dominate their shared existence.
After alluding to Isaac’s character’s trouble sleeping, Moon Knight trailer shows him getting to work on one of London’s iconic red double-decker buses and how he likes to be referred to as ‘Steven’ by his British Museum colleagues. the everything almost works, even if the trailer enters smoothly Moon Knight‘s more supernatural elements, but the Marvel magic of it all never manages to come together because of how tacky strange Isaac’s accent choice is here.
What’s strange about the way the Moon Knight trailer hinting that Steven and Marc are the same person implies that “Steven” has somehow managed to build a life in Britain where real Brits believe he is one of them, despite sounding like he had strayed from the stage of a Pygmalion revival. The strangeness of Steven’s English accent is probably meant to be a subtle hint at the fractured nature of Marc Spector’s mind, but Marvel’s history of dubious accents makes these kinds of details easy to interpret as downright bad decisions.
In the years after Wanda Maximoff first made her way into the Avengers in Age of Ultron with her Sokovian accent fully intact, the faintly Eastern European chant faded in her voice, just as she gradually turned into a redhead. While those choices felt somewhat inexplicable and arbitrary at first, WandaVision partially reaffirmed them to have much more emotional significance than they appeared, and Moon Knight could very well do something similar with Steven/Marc. However, what could also be the case is that Moon Knight is about to join Doctor Strange in the pantheon of MCU projects that should have just stuck with the actual speaking voices of their leads.
Moon Knight coming to Disney Plus on March 30.